When building a marketplace startup or the shared economy project aimed at enterprise level, there emerge dozens of decisions to make. One of which is: how to build a marketplace platform and what to choose? Outsource for the marketplace developers team or rely your project on online, SAAS-type marketplace app builders?

Here we’ll consider 2 primary ways of how to create an online marketplace. Let’s measure the
scope of pros and cons for both development methods.

What type of online marketplace platform are you aiming at?

The very first thing you need to do is to decide what kind of buy and sell
platform you want. Is it supposed to be an online marketplace for sellers? A B2B, B2C, or P2P marketplace platform development? Are you wondering how to build a
marketplace app, that is a cross-platform solution?

Before you get to the development process, we recommend you to create the business plan
for your online marketplace platform which would answer the following
questions 🤔:

What industry should it work for? Is it a unique product or are there
competitors already?

Who is it created for? What does my project have to
offer? How will it solve my customer’s pains?

What marketing + distribution techniques will work the best to create an online marketplace that would be on everyone's lips?

How can I monetize the project? What are the possible ways to earn
money on it?

The current marketplace app builder tool was launched by Antti Virolainen
and Juho Makkonen in 2011. The very concept of the solution is to let
people build, manage, and maintain a P2P buy and sell platform created on
their own.

First, Sharetribe gives you a 30-day trial to check out the features of the
chosen pricing plan. Then you can make your decision whether to start your
own online marketplace using the current solution, or look for other
marketplace app builders.

The primary advantage of these DIY solutions is that you can set up a neat
marketplace with no coding skills at all. You'll receive basic functionality out of
the box. Such solutions usually include drag-n-drop, WYSIWYG features, and work the best for building small-to-medium marketplace projects/startups.

How about the scale of customization ?

The drawback of such builders is that you lose the opportunities to customize your online
marketplace platform the way you want. Let us provide several examples for you:

- You want to start your own online marketplace in your
country, where apart from PayPal or Stripe, people
prefer other payment systems
, like Klarna, Skrill, or iDeal (in the Netherlands) only.

- Or let’s consider another example, where you want to implement different
types of notifications (i.e. SMS alerts, email, and push notifications) for
your online marketplace platform or sharing economy app at once.

If you create an online marketplace of enterprise level...

Online marketplace app builder is surely not enough. You need to understand
that enterprise marketplaces require way more extended functionality than
startups or MVPs.

First of all due to the fact that they’re crafted for a large number
of visitors/users, the appropriate front-end/back-end technologies
should be applied, that also work well for cross-platforms
multi-sided marketplace development.

Large products should be constantly supported, maintained, and
tested by a team of in-house or outsourced developers.

Owners of medium-to-large solutions might be in the constant rush
to implement new one-of-their-kind features. Thus, they need a relible tech team to get the work done correctly.

If you've chosen custom development of sharing economy apps/platforms, you should know that the prices here depend on a lot of aspects: the range of features you plan to implement, design work, R&D, etc. Thus, the process might get costly enough, sometimes.

The aim of this online marketplace platform is to connect people through
the food ritual in a warm homelike atmosphere. The app allows you to
arrange some kind of ‘meal parties’ right at your home and invite your friends or complete
strangers to have nice conversation and time.

The scope of work we were responsible for:

What solution should I choose in the end?

In case you’re wondering how to build a marketplace platform, not a heavily
customized one, which you’d like to support and handle on your own, go
ahead and try SAAS-builders.

If you’re about to create an online marketplace solution of enterprise level (B2B or B2C solution especially), DIY
platforms might be not enough, since as we’ve stated above, the bigger the product is, the more complex organization and more resources it requires. But, at
the same time, large B2B, B2C online marketplace platforms should be
intuitive in use for the end users.